XenForo Cloud discussion

[Chris D]

There are no plans to offer a resale service for licenses and the purchase of a cloud subscription is an entirely separate type of purchase, not linked to existing licenses in anyway.

That said, given there is no longer a single transfer limit for licenses, there are fewer barriers in place and you shouldn't have any issue privately re-selling your license if necessary and you would be able to contact us to transfer that to the new owner.

 

[TheGroove]

You can see the appeal for those who simply want a vanilla turnkey solution, it would be interesting to know the plan for hardware and dedicated VSPs and pricing tiers. One assumes XF is putting a lot of thought into what the hardware for all of this will take, we all know what it's like being on an overloaded host.

However, I would say there are easily a dozen addons I couldn't do without and until that becomes an option it could really be limiting those who would want to go this route. In the end it's not hard for a non-tech savvy board owner to employ someone to set it up on a VPS for $40 or $50 a month and then have all the control they want as admins.

 

[Slavik]

we all know what it's like being on an overloaded host.

Short of a huge hardware failure or issue, this will never be a problem. We certainly arent cramming customers into shared environments, from both a performance and security point of view.

 

[DigNap15]

I just hope it does not take any energy away from the development of the XF forum software.

That said getting a forum started was much harder than I thought so it could be good for newbies.

 

[⭐ Alex ⭐]

What would be really awesome is if the XenForo Cloud page had a "Self Host" section that contains open source Terraform (and other) scripts for the most popular cloud providers. So that way people self hosting have access to minimal setup forum deploy scripts. If open source it could be maintained by XenForo and the community in tandem.

Then the goal of making it easier for customers to deploy XenForo is reached for both those looking for managed and self hosted solutions.

 

[Mendalla]

New announcement and now with add-on support. I had to bypass this when I was writing a proposal for a possible new site due to the lack of add-on support so this certainly opens a lot of doors for the product. Still no import support so new forums only. $300/yr. is higher than what I pay now for support+hosting so I would still need to put together a business case to justify the increase but it is possibly in there.

Join the XenForo Cloud Beta (now with add-on support)

When we announced XenForo Cloud a little while back, we were encouraged by the great feedback we received. Having taken onboard all your comments, we have been hard at work refining our offering to make it an even more compelling proposition, and today we are ready to talk about some of the...

xenforo.com

 

[Chris D]

Bear in mind when we're out of the beta period prices will start at $60/month / $600/year.

For the avoidance of doubt - if you join us on the beta the $30/month / $300/year discount will be always valid for as long as you keep the subscription. We won't increase your price. But you may need to upgrade to a larger package as your forum grows.

 

[Mendalla]

Bear in mind when we're out of the beta period prices will start at $60/month / $600/year.

Right, which completely kills it for me for my current site. For the one I was working up a proposal for, though, possibly not since it was one I could have monetized.

 

[sbj]

I am not sure if it was asked already and possibly told already, so if that is the case I apologize for not reading carefully.

What are the specs people get for the 30/60$ plan? How much storage? Full SSD? CPU cores? RAM? Locations? Bandwidth?

 

[Chris D]

Right, which completely kills it for me for my current site. For the one I was working up a proposal for, though, possibly not since it was one I could have monetized.

Honestly we expect that to be the case for many existing customers, especially the ones that participate regularly on this forum as those kinds of customers are generally considered to be power users.

There's a not insignificant number of customers that rarely post here or rarely participate as much in the wider community. Some of these we hear more from via ticket support and may find they run into complex issues with hosting environments or running their own VPS/dedicated server and they may be happy to pay for a fully managed environment.

There will also be many customers who are happy to pay more but baulk at the idea of doing anything vaguely server related. Some customers we speak to even have trouble acquiring a domain name. These customers either don't cope well with the self-hosted situation or just don't bother becoming customers at all.

So if existing customers want to join us you're more than welcome and we'll make sure you you're looked after as we always do. If you don't, there's no hard feelings and you can still run the software on a self-hosted basis as you always have.

 

[Xon]

I've got a number of add-ons which use a 3rd party redis connector so I can directly query redis with it's advanced feature set over the stock redis connector (which only exposes get/set/multi-get or a very limited set of commends).

Would this still be doable with XF Cloud or would I need to adjust my add-ons which use redis to work with the stock redis connector somehow?

 

[Chris D]

I am not sure if it was asked already and possibly told already, so if that is the case I apologize for not reading carefully.

What are the specs people get for the 30/60$ plan? How much storage? Full SSD? CPU cores? RAM? Locations? Bandwidth?

We haven't disclosed specifics and may not do aside from the bits that are relevant. Bandwidth is metered on our side but not something we anticipate many customers (if any) will ever hit. For now it should be considered "unlimited".

As we disclosed in the announcement today, the storage is directly connected NVMe solid state drives.

In terms of locations, at minimum, there will be a choice of EU or North America.

Our plans are being designed around storage requirements and page views per month. We've nothing specific to announce today but the $30/$300 plan will be 20GB of storage and 150,000 page views per month. Bigger plans, including the non-discounted $60/$600 plan, will have larger allowances again but naturally part of running the beta is to help us get the data that will lead to final decisions on this kind of thing.

And, ultimately, that's why cores/RAM will be irrelevant. The plan you end up on with the allowance of page views you have should be manageable on the underlying hardware.

 

[Chris D]

I've got a number of add-ons which use a 3rd party redis connector so I can directly query redis with it's advanced feature set over the stock redis connector (which only exposes get/set/multi-get or a very limited set of commends).

Would this still be doable with XF Cloud or would I need to adjust my add-ons which use redis to work with the stock redis connector somehow?

It depends on a few things but I can't see it being a problem. A cloud customer can attempt to install any add-on. Some add-ons will be flagged automatically for review and the customer will get notified once it is approved.

This might be a good one for @NixFifty to test on his test subscription

 

[eva2000]

Bandwidth is metered on our side but not something we anticipate many customers (if any) will ever hit. For now it should be considered "unlimited".

If you end up in data centers or hosts were who have good peering you could apply or end up in Cloudflare's bandwidth alliance so outbound bandwidth to Cloudflare edge servers ends up free saving you heaps in bandwidth costs too

 

[deslocotoco]

Nice decision from XF to allow add-ons. Was a majority request, since we can expand the capabilities of the XenForo even further and some of then, are truly necessary.

But, i don't fully understand the 'not migrating' option right now. What's the point on this? As i can see, most of the XenForo administrators that already here want to be part of the XF Cloud and you guys will not offer migrating service? That's a bit confusing, or, i don't know if the demand from new communities are so high right now.

And how about server-side customization? Sending e-mails? Bounce system? This is going to work nicely? My users and visitors still can contact me with my forum/help desk e-mail?

For last, I'm a little worried about the 'page views' payment. My site have a very high fluctuation on access. My overall monthly average is 250k page views and more than half million impressions. Some times i get more than 1 million access per month (depending on the trending subject) - infos from AdSense.

And what about the CDN support? I think everybody uses CloudFlare for protection. Any toughs about that?

Well, I'm just registered my interest. Let's see whats happen now.

 

[Chris D]

Nice decision from XF to allow add-ons. Was a majority request, since we can expand the capabilities of the XenForo even further and some of then, are truly necessary.

It was always going to happen...

But, i don't fully understand the 'not migrating' option right now. What's the point on this? As i can see, most of the XenForo administrators that already here want to be part of the XF Cloud and you guys will not offer migrating service? That's a bit confusing, or, i don't know if the demand from new communities are so high right now.

...as is migration. It will happen. We're taking it slow and using that time to get things right. Somewhat counter-intuitively we don't want to be flooded with new sign ups right now as this gives us a lot of scope to test and change things. It's an iterative approach.

And how about server-side customization? Sending e-mails? Bounce system? This is going to work nicely? My users and visitors still can contact me with my forum/help desk e-mail?

Emails can be sent, bounces and unsubscribes are handled automatically, managed by us. There is no server-side customization. It's an entirely managed service. You have access to your forum's admin control panel, that's it.

For last, I'm a little worried about the 'page views' payment. My site have a very high fluctuation on access. My overall monthly average is 250k page views and more than half million impressions. Some times i get more than 1 million access per month (depending on the trending subject) - infos from AdSense.

It's not a hard limit. Temporary fluctuations are taken into consideration. If you exceed the allowance a small amount or only sporadically and temporarily this isn't an issue. You won't get cut off as soon as you hit the limit or anything.

And what about the CDN support? I think everybody uses CloudFlare for protection. Any toughs about that?

By default the site is already protected through our default domain names. If you bring across your own custom domain you can add this to your own Cloudflare account and point it at your installation to ensure that protection continues. There's likely to be improvements around this and DDoS protection generally in the future.

 

[sbj]

Where do you get the stats for pageviews? As far as I know XF doesn't have stats for that, am I wrong?

 

[deslocotoco]

Dear @Chris D, thanks for the attention, clarifying all my questions about this. I cannot wait until is fully deployed and the price, as i can see, is inside my expectations.

I'm really very interested in migrating my fully XF site (don't use any other software, just XF) to your services (I'm done with hosting companies without any kind of experience handling servers with Forums). Of course i will bring my own domain, maybe, even changing it to a dot com or similar.

About the CDN, well, if the solution offered by XF is good enough, i can drop my CloudFlare. My only concern is about the content delivery system.

Since I'm thinking about installing the Media Gallery add-on too, I'm thinking a lot of performance issues.

One suggestion/feature request. Would be great if your tip about using DigitalOcean Spaces or Amazon S3 for storage can be implemented in a more easy way in the XF Cloud service.

Thanks again Chris!

 

[Chris D]

Where do you get the stats for pageviews? As far as I know XF doesn't have stats for that, am I wrong?

XF doesn't collect stats for that. Self-hosted customers are better off using proper tools like Google Analytics or Piwik etc.

For Cloud customers we do collect and store page views and (in the near future!) will be displayed in the customer area and/or the admin control panel.

 

[Alpha1]

Some add-ons will be flagged automatically for review and the customer will get notified once it is approved.

It's really nice to read that XenForo Cloud will lead to addon code reviews. Could you expand on what the code reviews entail?
Are there any plans or thoughts on how the addon reviews will be used for addon listing in the XF resource manager on xenforo.com ?
It would be nice if a reviewed addon would get an indication in the resource manager that shows the findings. If it was approved or not.

I remember that the XFRM got a code review status some time ago.